NotesThe way there
The crossing
The Maraú Peninsula is reached by water. The journey begins on the quay.
There are two ways of reaching the Maraú Peninsula. Overland, along the BR-030, the road that runs the length of the peninsula. Or by water, leaving the quay at Camamu in a launch bound for Barra Grande. Nearly everyone chooses the water, and not only for convenience.
Camamu sits at the head of the bay that bears its name, one of the largest in Brazil. From the quay the open sea cannot be seen: one sees mangrove, island, channel. The bay is a closed world of quiet water, which opens only little by little.
The launch pulls out and, for a stretch, the shore keeps it company. Then it falls away. One passes islands at a distance, and the water changes colour with the depth. Those making the crossing for the first time look at everything. Those who have made it many times look at a single point, far ahead, where the bay meets the ocean.
That point is Ponta do Mutá. There stands the lighthouse that marks the mouth of the bay, and there, on the inner side, lies Barra Grande. On one side of the point, bay water. On the other, the Atlantic. The whole peninsula is like this: a tongue of land with two shores that do not resemble each other.
The town of Maraú, which gives the peninsula its name, stands on the shore of the bay and grew out of a Capuchin village of the early eighteenth century, called Mayrahú. The name is older than the road and than any travel map. It passed from the village to the town, from the town to the peninsula, and today it names a whole stretch of coast.
The crossing does a job the road cannot do. It separates. What stayed on the quay has stayed: the car, the hurry, the list of things left undone. Between one shore and the other there is an interval in which one is nowhere at all, and that interval is the door.
Between one shore and the other, one is nowhere at all. That interval is the door.
The bay has always been a road. The saveiros still built at Cajaíba, on the far shore, exist because people here travelled first by water. Whoever arrives by launch repeats, unknowingly, the oldest route of the place.
On the ocean side, the peninsula holds what the bay lacks: the reefs of Taipu de Fora and the Cassange lagoon, freshwater, set apart from the beach by a narrow strip of land. Whoever crossed the bay in the morning may, by afternoon, be facing the ocean. Few places offer both waters so close together.
On the way back, the same water. Only now one looks behind. The point shrinks, the lighthouse disappears, the mangrove closes again. Some leave the launch for the following day. Nobody finds it odd.
Other Notes
What the cove has kept
Before the summer visitors there was a chapel, a whaling station and the first farmed mussels in the state.
Read
The red stone
At Piraputanga, the ridge, the river and the railway run side by side.
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The reef
A line of living rock, close to the sand, decides what the sea is like at Milagres.
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